I am in the middle of trying to book a flight for 2 passengers to Europe for this summer. While I am notoriously bad at actually getting around to actually booking trips (analysis paralysis, anyone?), I’m trying to be better.

So, even though there are like 5000 different options for how I could get there ($65 flights from the USA to Edinburgh!), I’ve narrowed it down to using United miles to book 2 roundtrip tickets in business class. Assuming I stick to UA metal, this should be 230,000 United miles roundtrip, and also allow a United excursionist perk to open-jaw and visit 2 European cities on this trip before returning home

But United’s website is … the worst

No, I mean LITERALLY the worst. It’s so awful. I think the thing that I hate the most is that even though they provide a helpful “award calendar”, which in theory could help you figure out which dates had economy or premium availability.

But in practice, it’s completely useless as it has no bearing to ACTUAL availability. Above you see the calendar for August for a CLE-EDI search. But here’s availability for August 8th (which supposedly has only Economy availability).

There are 4 routes – 1 connecting through ORD and 1 connecting through EWR, on 2 separate BRU-EDI connections.

But the actual route that I’m trying to book is CLE-EDI, EDI-DUB, DUB-CLE, so if I throw that down into either a roundtrip or a Multi-City search, here’s what I get

Then I told him – “actually the problem is that United.com sucks” before allowing him to transfer me to web support

Web Support was not helpful either, and actually suggested that “United has different availability whether you book a one-way, roundtrip or multi-city”. He did the same searches I did online and found no availability (natch), so I thanked him for his time and hung up

Is this a thing?

This was the first I’d ever heard of this, so I was wondering if anyone else had ever run into this. Sure, I know United’s award availability is awful, but I’m used to a ticket either being available or not, not sometimes available and sometimes not. I know too that people have run into problems with the recent United website changes where you can’t “stitch together” bookings over the phone, but this doesn’t seem to be the same thing

I can certainly HUCA, and at a worst case, I can just book the award as 2 one-ways and pay cash for a cheap Ryanair ticket (looks like it’s about $28 one-way)

But I was curious if anyone else with more award booking experience had ever run into this excuse or not? Leave your data points in the comments!

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22 Comments

Ben
on February 24, 2017 at 9:57 am

I thought this is exactly what people meant when they said United doesn’t allow us to stitch together awards….i.e. an individual RT route CLE-EDI (that may even transit DUB on the return) has business availability but when searching CLE-EDI-DUB-CLE does not. I just assume this is United promising that you can use a stopover, but when it actually comes time to use it, they don’t show availability thereby reducing the value that you get out of your miles.

i called and talked to 3 reps + a supervisor. 2 of the reps knew about the new excursionist perk and what i was trying to do, the 3rd and the supervisor had no idea and said its not possible. i then gave the supervisor the link to their official website explaining the terms. in the end i was able to book my flight, lax-bog, ams-lis, lis-lax. but it was not without spending 3+ hours on the phone. apparently they had a glitch with their flights, that were showing as available for me, but no seats on their system. as with any customer service experience ymmv depending on who you talk to.

I recently searched SYD-ORD and got nothing other than a billion standard rewards. Then I searched AKL-ORD and got a saver AKL-SYD on NZ, SYD-ICN on Asiana and ICN-ORD on Asiana. But here is the kicker, if I just search ICN-ORD the Asiana direct flight doesn’t appear at all! It only shows up AKL-ORD. These searches are all one-ways.

When you search multi-city and try to add in the excursion perk, if you can call it a perk, the available flights to / from are completely different than what a round – trip search returns, to your point.

On the mobile app all United standard rewards are listed at the top and partner rewards are listed at the bottom. Plus they are listed in order of departure so a direct on a partner leaving late at night might be at the bottom.

The calendar is useless.

I agree they have destroyed this program. If not for ANA, OZ, Thai, BR, SK, OS and LX it would be, well American’s program.

I recently (successfully) booked a round trip award tickets (on ANA flights!) on United website, but when the “payment” part of the website kept crashing. So, I went to my phone app and that worked. I agree their website is really broken. But I have heard that they have made some improvements (from really sucky to just sucky) on their phone app interface. So my strategy right now is to look up actual flights on my PC first, then re-look up on the phone app before finalizing the purchase on the phone app.

I’m guessing you have the credit card? There are sometimes segments which show availability only for you when you book certain cities. I usually book to get the difficult segment then call up to change destination to what I really want.

I had a 3 hour call to book a European multi city. The availability on the website was completely different to what the CSR could see. The final solution involved me booking part of the trip online and then the CSR added legs I was unable to book. She was extremely helpful involving multiple supervisors to get the itinerary ticketed. I’ve since had a couple of schedule changes that caused miss-connects and have been fortunate to get alternate flights.

The CSR’s have a hard time seeing Germanwings flights that are bookable online.

I actually had a good experience on their website this week. I was trying to book a one-way from Europe to Chicago, and the flights were running ~$3,300 for economy and $5,500+ for business class. Then I looked at awards, and I found myself a really nice business class trip for 57K points + ~$150. I thought that was a pretty good deal…

I obviously can’t see the routings of your flight, but I can tell you that on multiple occasions this year .bomb showed Brussels Airlines Business Class award space that didn’t actually exist, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that is part of what is happening here. Did you double check that it actually existed on Aeroplan site?

I will have a followup post later but I think my problem is that the BRU-EDI space (Stobart Air) is fake-y. It doesn’t show up on AC or NH. What’s weird about it though is that united.com will let me ticket it if I book it as a one-way….

I had a problem yesterday when trying to book on Swiss Air awards space. If I booked a one way Chicago-Zurich-Barcelona it was 70k miles, but as soon as I tried to make a stopover in Zurich it added 25k for the Zurich to Barcelona flight. Makes no sense, there website is a mess.

I had a United rep actually confirm their website was still having issues since their update. Last week, I had booked 2 business class tickets from Australia to Vancouver on Air Canada (dreamliner!!) but I got an email when it was never ticketed. Turns out, it was phantom availability (at least according to the agent). They tried to refund my miles, but after some persistence, they were able to find me 2 more tickets available one day before my original dates. I was on their website at the same time and it was not showing this availability. Definitely some issues.

I firmly believe that AA & UA don’t want anyone to be able to use miles for free flights – domestic as well as international. So now we have no allegiance to any airline & just fly with the airline with the best price & most convenient times for us

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About Me

Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at dan@pointswithacrew.com.